Send

  Dr. Philips waved her hand, indicating I should continue. “Tell me…what’s an example of a bad thing?”

  Without hesitation, I replied, “Killing someone.”

  “Okay, now let’s consider the reverse, say, the driver of a car involved in an accident that kills his passenger. Is he now a bad person because of this?”

  “Well, no, of course not, but—”

  “What about if that driver had, say, fallen asleep at the wheel? Is he bad now?”

  Yes! He should have stopped at a motel if he was so tired. Well, wait. Maybe he didn’t realize how tired he was. Hell. “He made a mistake.”

  Dr. P. pointed a finger at me. “You got it. He made a mistake. It doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”

  My temper surged at the moralizing tone in her words. “Okay, look. I know where you’re going with this.” I waved my hands. “Everybody makes mistakes. Yes, sometimes killing someone isn’t bad. Doesn’t make it good either.”

  Dr. Philips nodded.

  “Dan, people aren’t just good or just bad at their most fundamental level. Everybody, every one of us, has the potential for both.”

  Oh.

  Hell no.

  This…this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I slumped lower in my seat. I couldn’t look at Dr. P. I knew there was bad in me, had known it for years. I could see it, and its name was Kenny. And that was why I kept him a secret. When she gasped and uncrossed her legs to lean toward me and take my hand, I sort of had to look at her. “I think you’ve misunderstood me, Dan. I’m saying you’re not bad and never were. You did something that wasn’t so nice, but neither was it evil, so I wonder why you persist in believing yourself to be.”

  Her words and the Hallmark tone that carried them twisted my lips into a sneer. “Not so nice? Really? Dr. Philips, the judge didn’t sentence me to nine months in juvenile detention because I broke the ‘not so nice’ law. He did it because I did something so…despicable,” I said as my sneer spread. “He wanted me off the streets to protect people.”

  Dr. Philips peered over her glasses and smiled. “Again, overly simplistic. Dan, the truth is the crime you committed was malicious and you deserved to be punished,” she said and ignored my wince. “I won’t argue that. However, I think your sentence was overly harsh. But your judge wanted to send a message.”

  Irony, Kenny sang.

  Pop always said the same thing. There were no laws against posting pictures of kids wearing Scooby-Doo underwear online, so I was charged with the next best thing—distributing kiddie porn. And then I thought of the scars on my chest.

  Message delivered.

  “But you have to remember Liam committed suicide. He was twelve years old. All you did was post a picture of him. I’d say his response was excessive, which makes me believe he had a lot of other problems.”

  Thinking about that made me frown. “So, you’re saying I shouldn’t feel guilty for what I did.”

  Dr. Philips rocked her head from side to side. “No. What you did was just one more problem for Liam in a life of so many. He reached his limit. You do feel guilty, and I think that’s a very good thing, but you must put it into the proper perspective. You shouldn’t feel so guilty that you believe you don’t deserve happiness in your life or, indeed, that you don’t deserve a life at all.”

  I laughed, a short, humorless sound. “Pretty sure Liam’s family would say I don’t.”

  She didn’t bother replying.

  Great. Did that mean I was right?

  “Okay. Our hour is almost up. I’d like to suggest something. Think of it as homework, give it some active thought.” She grinned and winked. “There are big differences between men and women, and I’m not talking about the physical ones.”

  I ignored Kenny’s evil little snicker.

  “I’m talking about the emotional ones. Women like to talk about problems, analyze their feelings, but men find little value in it.”

  I grinned at the irony. “True.”

  “You’re a man, Dan, with a problem you need to fix because it’s the way you were designed. Changing your name gave you a way to do that. And it worked for a while at least. Now you have a new problem, specifically finding ways to permit some happiness in your life. Think of the ways you can fix this problem, and we’ll pick up with that next week, okay?”

  Dr. Philips stood, and I shook her hand. As I left her office, my brow creased in thought.

  You have to tell Julie the truth. Kenny started in as soon as I started the car.

  No. No way in hell was I about to put Mom and Dad through all that again. I thought of the mums my mother planted. Planting flowers meant she wanted to stay. She liked it here.

  I would not ruin that.

  Sweeter Than You Look

  Dr. Philips’s homework assignment was all I thought about on my way home. Crap. It made sense in a warped sort of way. I was a fixer. A repair man. The image of me in a tool belt made me roll my eyes. I hid a smile at the bottom of the Italian ice I’d just bought. Cake batter. Yum.

  Since we’d moved to Holtsville, I’d driven past Ralph’s Italian Ices every day. I’d never stopped at the always-crowded store, but I did today because an enormous sign said it was the last day of the season and I didn’t want to miss out. So I sat at a rickety picnic table while summer hung on by its thumbs, slurping my cake-flavored ice, imagining how I could fix all the crap in my life.

  Pop. He was a tough one. He didn’t talk to me. I didn’t know why. He’d talked to me in juvie, so it had nothing to do with my crime. It wasn’t until later, after I was released and we’d had to move a bunch of times—

  Yahtzee.

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t put this together before. He must be tired of all the moving. He’d been living with us since I was about nine, after Gram died. They’d lived apart for a long time before that. I don’t know if they were divorced or not. Every time I’d ask, my mother would whisk me out of the room. I knew Pop wasn’t an easy man to get along with. He and Dad fought. A lot. But when I was little, we were tight. When Dad sent me to my room, Pop was the one who talked me out of all the “You’ll be sorry” fantasies I plotted while I was mopping my tears. After I…after my arrest, Pop was the one who hired a second lawyer because the first one only wanted me to plead guilty.

  Pop had gone nuclear. Fired the guy on the spot, said we’d take our chances in court. I was terrified. “Trust me.” He’d winked and grinned, and I had trusted him. We went to court with a second lawyer. After my sentencing, Pop held my hand as the bailiffs handed me off to juvenile detention and visited as often as it was allowed. I wasn’t just scared; I was fucking terrified. He warned me, said I had to lose that “Wake me up ’cause I’m having a nightmare” look or they’d pass me around like an appetizer.

  He was right.

  It was nearly Halloween by the time I was released. They’d had a welcome home party for me. Mom, Dad, and Pop. None of my friends came. Probably because they were no longer my friends. Kenny was there, though, sitting right next to Pop and freaking me way the hell out. It was all okay though. Nothing mattered. I was out. I was home. My family hadn’t left me there to rot like I’d so often worried. We ate all my favorite foods and talked about school. I’d missed a lot. Half of the previous term plus two months of the current one. I was anxious to get back to my friends, my teammates, even though none of them had ever called or visited.

  “Buddy—” My father’s face tightened, and his voice held the same tone it always did when he had bad news to deliver. I’d braced for it. I knew after what I’d done, I wouldn’t be allowed to play hockey or return to school, but before he could say the words, glass exploded all over us. Something hit me hard from my right, and suddenly, I was on the floor. I’d fought against the heavy weight pinning me there. My mother’s screams echoed in my ears. My dad had run
to the front door, wrenched it open, and from my vantage point on the floor under my grandfather’s arm, I’d seen a small crowd of kids in front of our house.

  They were shouting that they didn’t want a deviant in their classrooms, a pervert on their team. They weren’t all kids though. Jack Murphy, Liam’s dad, was there with a bat. My best friend—the same kid who laughed when I snapped Liam’s picture—held a brick. Kenny’s voice in my head stated the obvious. Dude, he ain’t your friend anymore.

  The rest of that night passed in a blur. I remember the police arrived, broke up the crowd. Dad and Pop nailed boards over the broken window. My mother cleaned up the glass. The brick that broke through the window skidded over the dining room table, gouging a deep scar through the surface. I stared at the gouge. Me. The table. Both scarred. I’d stood there with my thumb up my ass, unable to think, let alone help. Then there was a suitcase in my hand, and my mother was tugging me toward her car.

  We’d fled. It was ten o’clock at night. We’d driven to the next county and holed up in a Holiday Inn for the night. Pop and Dad were there when I woke up the next morning, comforting me while I screamed myself awake. My parents sold the house with the help of lawyer number three, and we moved an hour or so west of my Jersey Shore hometown. The new house was bigger than our old one was, and it even had a pool. All my old stuff somehow managed to get shipped to us.

  Except for the scarred dining room table.

  I hated it, hated every minute we spent away from the shore. I enrolled in ninth grade, but by April, it began all over again when the kids at my new school discovered I was the same kid on the news. And then we had to move. We tried Maryland. Then Delaware. Finally, New York, under a new name. It was somewhere, sometime between New Jersey and Delaware, I think, when I’d tried to anesthetize myself to all my issues. I didn’t like smoking, so marijuana wasn’t much use, but drinking helped. For a while. When I reached a point where I was drunk by breakfast, Pop and Dad decided to knock some sense into me.

  I’d stumbled down the stairs one morning, saw my bags packed by the front door, and totally lost it. They were sending me back. I knew it! I knew this would happen someday. I screamed, cursed, broke stuff, raged like a wounded animal while they tried to talk to me. It wasn’t until Pop pointed over my shoulder and I saw my mother sobbing on the floor, knees tucked to her chest, that I was able to listen. “You did that,” they’d told me. I’d pushed her, knocked her down. I didn’t remember doing it, and that scared the fucking hell out of me, so I listened. They weren’t sending me back as it turned out. Instead, they were taking me camping.

  I’d stood there, blinking, trying to get my well-lubricated brain to process that. Camping?

  We were away for a week. I don’t know where the hell we went. I’d spent most of the week puking up my guts inside the camper they’d rented. “Talk,” they’d said after my stomach had finally settled. And I did. I told them everything. Almost all of it—I left out the Kenny parts—to how I’d earned every last scar. “So what now?” I’d asked them.

  “Now we save you,” my father had answered.

  “What if I’m not worth it?” I’d replied. I was a fourteen-year-old juvenile delinquent with a hangover, and they wanted to save me. I had a hard time understanding why. Hell, I still wasn’t sure I understood why. I only knew something in me shifted during that trip, and instead of wanting to die, I wanted saving like I wanted air.

  I sobered up. Got my head on straight. Took on as much extra work as I could manage to help the family. But I’d missed so much schoolwork during my pickling, as Pop used to call it, I’d had to repeat the ninth grade. It was somewhere, sometime among all these stops when Pop grew cold, brusque, and finally avoided me altogether.

  Guess he hoped to be left in peace instead of traipsing all over the eastern seaboard. The first time, he was all for it, but now? Maybe— A dark thought filtered through my panic. Could he want me dead?

  Probably does.

  Before I could retort, piercing shrieks made me jolt and turn. In the busy parking lot, a little girl had broken free of her mother’s hand and run, run until she’d tripped and sprawled on the pavement right behind an SUV about to back up.

  I ran before thinking, pounded on the rear of the SUV. I reached the toddler before her mother did, a heavily pregnant woman doing her best to move fast. I picked up the girl, propped her on one knee to see how badly she was hurt. Her knees were scraped raw and filthy.

  “Oh God! Thank you. She outruns me now.” The toddler’s mother panted, rubbing her belly. “Emily, Emily, you’re okay, honey.” She cooed at the wailing tot. “Oh, she’s hurt. I have some first-aid stuff in my bag.” Her mother rooted around in a diaper bag nearly as large as Julie’s satchel. I scowled because things like purses now reminded me of Julie.

  I scooped up the shrieking toddler and offered her mother my other arm to lead them to my picnic table so the SUV could leave the lot. “You okay?” I asked the mother.

  The woman looked up at me with a wince. “Yeah, just a stitch. He didn’t like me trying to run.”

  She eased down to the bench, huffing, and removed from her bag a lollipop, a bottle of water, a package of Band-Aids, and a tube of antibacterial ointment. My God, was there anything women did not carry in their bags?

  “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s fix up your knee.”

  Emily was having none of that. She turned and hid her face in my shoulder. That made me feel kind of warm inside.

  “Emily!” the woman scolded, but I laughed.

  “It’s okay. I can hold her while you bandage.”

  The toddler squirmed in my arms while her mother squirted the water bottle at her wounds. I distracted her with my car keys while Mom dabbed her knees dry before covering them with the bandages smudged with antibacterial ointment.

  “There you go. All better.” The woman smiled, but little Emily shook her head.

  “Oh. Right. She needs kisses too.” Her mother sighed. With obvious discomfort, the woman bent down to kiss one knee, then the other. “Better now, honey?”

  Again, Emily shook her head and pointed to me. I hesitated. Legally, I wasn’t allowed near children, but she seemed to really like me.

  Come on, man, get over it. Nobody will know, Kenny groaned.

  Really? Somehow, nobody found out at in the last three towns we’d lived. But one look at Emily’s big blue eyes, eyes that reminded me of Julie’s, and I was toast. I lifted her higher and kissed two chubby knees with loud smacks, and she giggled.

  “Okay, I promised her an Italian ice.” Mom stood and reached for the girl. “I’ll get it,” I offered. “What kind?”

  “Small lemon.”

  I left Emily with her mother, stood in line to buy her treat. A few minutes later, the girl was happily back on my lap, digging in. “How old is she?” I finally asked just to make conversation.

  “Eighteen months.”

  “She’s…um, cute.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for catching her. If you hadn’t been here, she could have been—” she squeezed her eyes shut and I squirmed while she mopped her eyes with one of Emily’s napkins. Emily had inherited her mother’s eyes, though Emily’s were still watery.

  “No problem. I’m glad I could help.” I tickled Emily under her chin.

  “You’re good with toddlers. You know, she hates strangers but really seems to like you.”

  My face warmed, and I looked down at my feet, grinning. “Chick magnet. What can I say?”

  My face got hotter when Emily’s mother laughed. Kenny nearly went into convulsions in my head.

  Emily fisted the spoon in her hand and shoveled in a mouthful. It was cold and sour, and she shuddered from head to toe. She did it again, and I laughed.

  “When is this one due?” I asked.

  Emily’s mother sighed and patted
the mound under her shirt. “Monday. Hope he plans on keeping that appointment.”

  “You’re having a boy?”

  “Yeah. We still can’t settle on his name though. My husband likes Ian, but I like Kenneth.”

  Good thing the toddler dropped a spoonful of her lemon ice on my leg. It disguised my flinch.

  “Go with Ian,” I said. When I looked up, there was another set of icy blue eyes on me. They did not, however, belong to the pregnant woman or the toddler.

  Julie Murphy was in the Italian Ices line, staring at me. My legs bounced with the compulsion to run.

  Jeez, man, paranoid much?

  “Yeah, maybe.” Emily’s mother said and braced her hands on the table to heave herself upright. “Thanks for rescuing us. Looks like bath time for a certain sticky little girl.” She held out her arms, but I tightened my grip on the toddler.

  “Please. Let me.”

  Yeah, I knew I was tempting fate. Sue me.

  With Emily on one hip and her mother leaning on my free arm, I escorted them back to the minivan parked across the lot from the table. Emily now clutched the lollipop in two hands. I put Emily in her car seat, stepped back while her mother fastened the straps, and then I helped her mother into the driver’s seat. With a wave and a honk of the horn, they were gone. I didn’t know why that made me sad.

  I glanced back at the shop, saw Julie had already been served. I hesitated. Should I leave or try to talk to her?

  Talk to her, you ass.

  Okay. Fine. “Hey.” I shoved my hands into my pockets and strolled back to the table.

  “Hey, Dan. You know them?” Julie jerked her head at the disappearing minivan.

  “No, she needed help and—”

  “Right. Somebody needs rescuing, and you’re right there to do it. You can’t help yourself.” One corner of her mouth tilted up, but her eyes were sad.

  “No, I guess I can’t,” I retorted with the same level of hostility and turned to leave.

  “Wait.”